CERN finds a new particle + News alerts for the cosmos

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Heads up, subatomic lovers. A new particle just dropped. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they have discovered something like an extra heavy proton. Here to tell us what that means is Hassan Jawahery, a member of the LHCB experiment. Welcome, Hassan.

HASSAN JAWAHERY: Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I’m happy to talk about the LHCB result.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, so describe this new little particle for us. It’s been described as “like a proton.” What is it exactly?

HASSAN JAWAHERY: So that’s actually a very good description, which you put there as a heavy proton. So what’s been discovered by LHCB is the first observation of a composite particle, which contains two charm quarks and a down quark. So it’s a proton-like particle because ordinary proton contains actually two up quarks and one down quark. So in this particle, the two up quarks have been replaced by the charm quark, and the charm quark, being so heavy, makes this particle about four times heavier than the ordinary proton.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Put the finding in context. Is this like discovering a new species of frog, or an astronomer finding a new exoplanet, or even more fundamental than that?

HASSAN JAWAHERY: So I think yes, what you just described is really more of a finding an extra planet. We haven’t discovered a new fundamental particles, but these particles are made up of fundamental particles. The fundamental particles here are the quarks. We are all made up of quarks, but the kind of quarks which participate in the structure of the ordinary matter are the lightest ones, which we call them up and down quarks. Those are relatively light and they form– for example, the proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark, and a neutron is made up of two down quarks and one up quark.

Everything else which we see around us, in the stars, in the galaxies, and so on, are made up of the same quarks. In this case, we’ve seen a particle which is made up of a heavy quark. Normally, we don’t have those quarks in nature. They are only produced in very high-energy collisions of particles, and they were around when the universe was formed at the very early time after the Big Bang. After that, we have to make them in the lab. And so the laws of nature, the laws that we’ve discovered about these constituents, the way they interact with each other, suggests that there should be a proton-like object made up of these quarks.

The fact that we see the properties corresponding to the predictions based on our theory is very important because it gives us insight into how accurate these theoretical foundations are.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, I was going to ask that. Is this particle something you expected to find, or is the data ahead of the theory in this case. So yeah, that’s a very good question. And this particle was expected to be found and, in fact, its mass and some of its properties were predicted. And the fact that we see it now is really have to do with the fact that these are very heavy objects. So we have to improve our experimental sensitivity to see it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You upgraded the machine, basically.

HASSAN JAWAHERY: Yeah, that’s right.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so how long does this particle exist?

HASSAN JAWAHERY: So yeah, the difference between this particle as– even though we call it proton-like, proton lives forever, as far as we know. The lifetime is known to be more than 10 to the 31 years or so on. But this particle made up of heavy quark only lives a few trillionth of a second. Actually, less than a few trillionths of a second.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Lives fast, dies young.

HASSAN JAWAHERY: Yeah, so it doesn’t really live long enough to form any object, for example, an atom made of it or something beyond that. But the fact that we see them shows that the laws which we understand about how the quarks interact are as we expect them to be.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, does this particle tell you anything new about the forces that bind these fundamental particles together, bind quarks together?

HASSAN JAWAHERY: Well, that’s something that we will eventually extract from them because we don’t still know all their properties. So we have seen it. They are the right mass, and we’ve seen that this lifetime is short, but we haven’t seen all the other properties. So there are many other properties that we have to study when we have a larger fraction of them. And that’s why the experiment will be running for years. When we do that, then we might actually discover effects which will tell us aspects of the theories that we know. So we are not there yet, but that’s one of the goals.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What comes next? Do you just crank up the power knob?

HASSAN JAWAHERY: So yeah, we will be running for many years. And eventually, what we want to see in this line of research is another particle, which is another proton-like object, which will have the two charm quarks and a strange quark. But one of the major lines of research in LHCB is to study the B quark. And that is at the core of one of the biggest mysteries that we have in nature, which is why, even though the universe seems to have been produced symmetric between matter and antimatter at the very early time, yet the universe is all made up of matter rather than antimatter. And so what happened to all that antimatter?

So really, the biggest mission of LHCB is to uncover the reason behind that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I can’t wait to follow along. Thanks, Hassan.

HASSAN JAWAHERY: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Hassan Jawahery is a distinguished University professor at the University of Maryland and a member of the LHCB consortium. After the break, turning from the ultra small to the ultra big. Getting news alerts for the entire universe. Stick around.

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There’s news alerts, emergency alerts, and now we bring you astronomy alerts. The Rubin Observatory– you know it. the telescope on a mountaintop in Chile– aims to take a movie of the entire southern sky every night. And it recently tested its own alert system to give astronomers a heads up when the telescope spots an unusual change in the sky. Guess how many times it went ding that first night. 800,000.

Here to tell us why we shouldn’t silence those alerts is Dr. Eric Bellm. He’s head of the group that developed the alert system for Rubin. Hey, Eric.

ERIC BELLM: Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks for being here. I’m picturing some grad student just having their phone blowing up 800,000 times. Is that mental image correct?

ERIC BELLM: I hope not. The Rubin alert stream is, as you said, it’s extremely large. But typically, a scientist who’s trying to find things to follow up in real time is only interested in a relatively small handful. So they’re going to try to filter down that huge stream of notifications to just a handful that are of interest to them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so what kinds of things trigger an alert?

ERIC BELLM: Anything that we see that is moving, or changing, or brightening in the sky. And so astrophysically, that includes things like asteroids, exploding stars like supernovae, variable stars that are brightening and dimming, as well as rare types of all of those things.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And how fast do the alerts come?

ERIC BELLM: Just in a couple of minutes after the image is taken, we’re trying to make sure that scientists can very rapidly follow up the things that they care about.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I wondered, in that hundreds of thousands of alerts that first night, were there any real “wow, I can’t believe this is there” things?

ERIC BELLM: We’re just getting started, and so scientists are of tuning their algorithms to find the things they most care about. So it’s a little early to say. There definitely were some asteroids that folks noticed were rotating very rapidly. So that was one of the things that came out of that first night’s observations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So how does this alert system actually work? What’s the flow of data?

ERIC BELLM: Yeah, so Ruben is down in Chile. And every 30 seconds, it takes an image of the night sky. And that image is transmitted over fiber optic networks up to California, where at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, there’s a data facility that processes the images. And then we compare it against a stack of images from that position of the sky where we had previously observed. And so by differencing those two images, we’re able to find anything that is changing from the previous stack of images.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Were you surprised by the volume?

ERIC BELLM: No, we’re expecting actually an even larger volume once we’re up to full operation, something like 7 million alerts a night total.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There must be an art to filtering down to the most important things. What’s the trickiest part about building an alert system like this?

ERIC BELLM: Yeah, the filtering is the most challenging part. That’s where the art, and the practice and the experience come in. The challenge is to tune the criteria so that you can pick out the thing you most care about without being overwhelmed by hundreds or thousands of other objects that you have to sort through on your way to finding the thing you really are interested in.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, is there machine learning involved? Will the alerts become more and more precise as you go along?

ERIC BELLM: Yes, we definitely use machine learning, both in the production of the alerts, and scientists, as well, use various classification algorithms, just like perhaps your email client or something tries to pick out the emails you most care about. And those are things we’re going to be tuning up in the next weeks and months, as the survey sort of scales up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That does seem like the sort of operative problem that you have so much data coming in, that figuring out which data to pay attention to seems very important. Does it feel like a lot of pressure, Eric?

ERIC BELLM: Yeah. Certainly for these things that may be fading away quickly or disappearing, there is a challenge to try to find it in real time while you can still follow it up. And that’s why we have this real time alert stream to make sure that scientists have the best opportunity.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do the alerts go to people, or are they telling a telescope somewhere else to turn on or look at a particular thing?

ERIC BELLM: There definitely are fully automated systems that will take the alert stream and follow it up in real time based on some preset criteria. There also are scientists who may have telescope time that they’ve been awarded, who really want to put their eyes on the data before they commit to using that telescope time. So I would say it’s still most common that at the end of the procedure, there’s a human somewhere in the loop saying, yes, this is the event I really want to see. Let me trigger the Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb Space Telescope to follow it up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is this for professional academic astronomers only? Or are you interested in amateurs using this, as well?

ERIC BELLM: Our first goal is, again, to make discoveries about the universe. And so professional astronomers are our first audience. But there definitely is room for amateurs to contribute. And Rubin has a large education and public outreach team that is planning some specific projects around the alert stream that can help highlight objects that amateurs might be interested in following up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Can I sign up? And then will it actually ding my phone? Because this is the kind of news alert I feel like I need in my life.

ERIC BELLM: I don’t know if you need millions of them every night, but yes, I think there will be facilities that you can– you could get a summary at least of the previous night’s discoveries.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I do feel like it would be very cool to get a news alert or an astronomical alert that was like “new black hole nearby.”

ERIC BELLM: Yes, absolutely. I agree.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] Dr. Eric Bellm is the Alert Product Group Lead for the Rubin Observatory and a Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Thanks, Eric.

ERIC BELLM: Thanks, Laura.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Charles Bergquist. And if you’ve got questions about the universe, big or small, we want to know about them. Please give us a call. The listener line is always open. 877-4SCIFRI. 877-4SCIFRI. I hope you have a charmed day. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thank you for listening.

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